Elizabeth's Reviews > Revelation

What a disappointing sequel. The main character is so very much out of character that it’s hard to believe he’s the same person from the last story. It isn’t so much a matter of the character growing or regressing; it’s just that he’s so altogether different. And he’s not even all that likeable here, but to be fair, the other characters aren’t, either. Add to that a confusing and tedious plot—so slow-moving—and it’s easy to see why it took me so long to finish reading this one. The best part of the first novel was the friendship between the two main characters, but one of those friends isn’t even in this story except for a handful of pages. This novel, the middle in the trilogy, is supposed to involve a drastic surprise for the hero that shakes his whole understanding of the world of magic. But as it happens here, it just seemed to me that the author tore down her excellent world-building from the first novel to replace it with something that wasn’t as well-crafted. All in all, I found it hard to care. 2.5 stars rounded up to 3, mostly for the sake of the last 25% of the story. The book ends in a riveting drama that kept me turning pages and—finally—made me care again about these characters. If the whole book were that well-written, this would have been a very different reading experience.